Its not a Religious Statement, Its a Cultural Statement!!!

This is an old Article on expressindia.com website. It is reproduced below. But the actual research by Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is here . Its one thing to have it as a tourist attraction, another to respect the skill of the people of ancient India. Where has that skill gone? Why are we still dependent on the west for a new invention. Why are we still in a service mode that getting into a creation mode? The answer pprobably lies in the thousand years of servitude that the people of India have gone through.

“Experts at the Indian Instituteof Technology have resolved the mystery behind the 1,600-year-old iron pillar in Delhi, which has never corroded despite the capital’s harsh weather.

Metallurgists at Kanpur IIT have discovered that a thin layer of “misawite”, a compound of iron, oxygen and hydrogen, has protected the cast iron pillar from rust.

The protective film took form within three years after erection of the pillar and has been growing ever so slowly since then. After 1,600 years, the film has grown just one-twentieth of a millimeter thick, according to R. Balasubramaniam of the IIT.

In a report published in the journal Current Science Balasubramanian says, the protective film was formed catalytically by the presence of high amounts of phosphorous in the iron—as much as one per cent against less than 0.05 per cent in today’s iron. The high phosphorous content is a result of the unique iron-making process practiced by ancient Indians, who reduced iron ore into steel in one step by mixing it with charcoal.

Modern blast furnaces, on the other hand, use limestone in place of charcoal yielding molten slag and pig iron that is later converted into steel. In the modern process most phosphorous is carried away by the slag.

The pillar—over seven metres high and weighing more than six tonnes—was erected by Kumara Gupta of Gupta dynasty that ruled northern India in AD 320-540.

Stating that the pillar is “a living testimony to the skill of metallurgists of ancient India”, Balasubramaniam said the “kinetic scheme” that his group developed for predicting growth of the protective film may be useful for modeling long-term corrosion behaviour of containers for nuclear storage applications.”

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A peek into a land called India.

A land where we have minorities as those people who are similar in almost everything to the majority, except for the way they pray to god. Still we are looking at reservations for them. A country where the “lower caste” is given reservations to liberate them from the oppression, and the one who benefit from the reservations are the politicians and the “lower caste” people who are already liberated and flush with money. A country where women are revered in temples, while being oppressed immediately outside the steps of the temple. A country where people watch the full coverage of the swearing in ceremony of the US president, while they probably don’t know who our president is and for sure dot know who our vice president is.

A country inspite of all its problems is on the verge of becoming a global power. (So they say)